After all these years, Cuba still casts spell

November 29, 2007|By DAVE KEHR The New York Times

Filmed in 1964 but largely forgotten until a screening at the 1992 Telluride Film Festival, I Am Cuba remains one of the great UFOs of the movies, a stylistic exercise so inventively extravagant that it still provokes gasps of amazement. The Soviet government had commissioned the director Mikhail Kalatozov to create a stolid, Socialist Realist monument to the Cuban Revolution. What it got instead was an avant-garde freakout that continues to cast a spell over filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson.

The film is grounded in propaganda-poster imagery that even the film's Cuban screenwriter, Enrique Pineda Barnet, found excessively romanticized: noble peasants, evil capitalists, bearded revolutionaries battling for justice under a tropical sun. But Kalatozov and his cinematographer, Sergei Urusevksy, quickly left realism behind, using infrared film, a hand-held camera and an extreme wide-angle lens that stops just short of a fish-eye effect to create a series of radical long takes, such as the dazzlingly shot sequence depicting the funeral parade for a martyred student protester. Politics dissolve in the face of such grand, formalist gestures, as the Communist press sternly noted at the time of the film's first, unsuccessful release.

For a new DVD edition of I Am Cuba ($44.95), Milestone Film and Video has bundled a new transfer from a Russian fine-grain print with The Siberian Mammoth, Vicente Ferraz's 2005 Brazilian documentary about the film's making, and a documentary on Kalatozov by his grandson, Mikhail Kalatozishvili. The three discs come packaged in a miniature cigar box, quite an inventive formalist gesture in itself.